


and the story’s brand new

by caneros



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Epistolary, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Will Byers Has Not Had A Good Time With Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24005074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caneros/pseuds/caneros
Summary: A guide to finding love and losing it again.
Relationships: Will Byers/Mike Wheeler
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

Dear Mike,

You asked me once what I thought love was. I said I didn’t know. That was a lie. Possibly the biggest lie I’ve ever told. Because here’s the thing; here’s the thing that I’ve never told anyone at all, and I think you’ll know why soon enough:

Love was the feeling I had whenever I was with you, a jackrabbit hammer of my heart, fingers on my pulse point and realising it’s beating at a far faster rate than normal. A far faster rate than even running the mile at school can cause. Because when I finish my final loop of the track and I’m gasping for both water and air, it still doesn’t top the pulsating rate of my heart when I even merely _look_ at you. Love – loving _you,_ if we’re being specific – was like a rollercoaster I could never quite stop, even when my fingers could reach the controls. Jammed; stuck, the way I’m stuck on you. Love – it’s a funny word, isn’t it? L-O-V-E. I never felt it with anyone quite like the way I felt it with you. And love, the way I experienced it with you and maybe the way I experienced it _most,_ made itself most clear to me in those car journeys we sometimes took to places we’d never been before, along the meandering Indiana back roads with the sun on our faces and the wind in our hair.

And you looked beautiful in those moments; you did. With your tumbleweed raven-black hair and the sunlight seemingly entangled in it, making the lightest strands a shade of golden so ethereal I thought my heart was going to burst out my chest. With your eyes like a buried gold mine – and I often thought I wouldn't mind getting lost in them, even if it meant stifled breaths and losing myself forever, because I'd rather it was that way instead of the way it is; I'd rather it was me than you – I'd rather lose myself to the dust and the dirt than lose you to everything else.

And there’s a memory in those car rides, too, somewhere: you turn the crackly radio up loud to sing along to the songs that blast through the crappy speakers of your car, a smile on your face that’s bright enough to light the sky. The _whole_ sky. I’m not just waxing poetic when I say that, nor when I say I prefer the gleam and glint of your smile compared to the glare of the sun. That can be sometimes harsh, but your grin never was. It burned me from the inside out, sure, but never in a way that irrevocably hurt. Sometimes not even at all.

But, much in the same way as the sun, you never quite noticed when I was looking at you and basking in your warmth. Or maybe you did, and you just chose to ignore it. Strangely, that hurts more than anything else – and I'm well acquainted with pain. _Too_ acquainted, some might say.

I'll tell you another secret, otherwise I might take it to the grave: even now, even after all this time, the thought of you still makes my heart warm, makes it burn, makes it melt like candle wax, dripping and seeping into every inner crevice of my body. It’s unbearable, sometimes ~~(a lot of the time)~~ , especially now that I don’t have you, but it’s a pain I’ve learnt to live with. I've had plenty of practice with that; it's almost a sixth sense to me now.

Perhaps _that’s_ what they mean in those cheesy romance movies El and Dustin watch like they’re a religion – in those moments when the main characters tell the other that they love them: that they make their heart feel fit to burst at any given moment. Maybe that's what love _is._ Maybe that's all it'll ever be. Pain, and more pain, stacked upon more pain, in a never-ending and forever kind of way. Aches and burns and hurt in all the worst ways. I'd rather not think about it.

And maybe that’s what me and you are: the main characters in our own love story, and the scene where we say we love each other hasn’t been shot yet but we both know that it’s over before it’s even started.

And maybe _that's_ wishful thinking, imagining you'd ever have said you love me too. Who am I to say that? Who am I to speculate about the dead? I don't think it matters that you were my best friend.

But every second with you was a challenge not to tell you, not to spill my guts out to you, every single inch of them until there was none left in me, all unravelled hanging out my body – maybe much the same way your limp arm was hanging off the grained wood table when Hopper was desperately trying to breathe the life back into you, for El’s sake if not his own.

(God, it makes me sick just thinking about it – seeing you that way, knowing deep down that there was no getting you back but believing in the surface-level hope anyway. I needed it; we _all_ did. Our lives had just changed forever – even more irreversibly so.)

Every second with you, I was fighting with myself not to tell you, all because I couldn’t be sure if you felt the same. Even in those moments that it felt like you did, albeit rare and few and far between. (I saw hope in those moments. I saw sunlight.) And when I thought I’d be able to, when I thought I’d finally be able to let the words spill out my mouth – not the same gut-spill I often thought of, but close, similar, enough for what it actually was – for once, to the person who deserved to hear them the most, I couldn’t muster up the courage. It was split-second, all at once; I thought I could, and then I couldn’t. My mouth would stop working and the words would get caught in my throat, and I’d be resorted to staring at you the way I always was. With awe inherent in my eyes and a mouth agape to the point where I could probably catch ten flies in it all at once.

Now, though? All those times, all those instances passed by, all those missed moments when I could have just buckled myself up for the ensuing rollercoaster and coerced myself into saying those three sacred words? They were nothing but a wasted chance.

It’s not like I can say it to you now, is it? Not properly. Not in a way that you'd receive. You’re gone, _long_ gone, slipped away into the void to a place where everything – and I repeat: _everything_ – is irreversible. Yet, even despite that, I’ll still always love you, no matter what. That's a promise. One that I'm willing to make. One that I'm willing to keep.

I’ll still always love you and your gap teeth that made my heart swell like nothing else could. The way you’d consistently drum a beat out onto every surface you could, as if the tapping of your fingers was the music stuck in your head's only release. The way your threw your head back when you laughed, exposing your Adam’s apple to the nation and making my heart beat tenfold, just from that simple, everyday motion. The way you always seemed to be able to make me happy when no else could, just by being there, next to me, rubbing smooth, perfect circles in the palm of my hand with your thumb.

I’ll love you, still; I'll love you, always; I'll love you, forever. In a million different universes. In a million different lifetimes. I just hope you know that. I hope you know it more than I’ve ever hoped for anything else. And I’m not one for praying, but in this case I just might.

Always yours, Will


	2. Chapter 2

Dear Mike,

I sometimes wonder where you are now, where life – if that’s even an applicable term when there is the gaping absence of it – has led you. If you still enjoy clambering down to where the rocks and water of the quarry interlock to skip stones and watch as they bounce across the water and send ripples spiralling to the edges. (Your death was rather like that; it sent shock waves through all of Hawkins. No one was expecting it. It started small, and then it grew and grew until it all blurred into one. Nothing returned back to the way it was, though; we were all irreversibly changed – your life impacted more people than you could know.) If you still enjoy going through those exact same motions except instead of gathering stones you sit and watch the sunset instead, looking on as oranges and reds and pinks create a watercolour painting across the sky. If you still enjoy the memory of those moments, when you had your hand clutched in mine, fingers interweaved – on the nights when my mom would allow me out and even on the days she wouldn’t.

Do you remember that, and how sneaking out my bedroom window wasn’t so hard, considering that it was a one foot jump to the ground?

(I remember it, and sometimes I hear the phantom knock of you at the window, the exact way you rapped your knuckles against it. I remember it all: the way you acted like the knight in shining armour come to save the princess from the tower, the way you laughed every time, all the way from my house to the quarry, your eyes crinkled and your mouth opened on a smile.)

I hope you do too. I hope you remember the same things I do – the same small incremental moments. Every day, I hope, to God – and even the devil, sometimes, because it seems like he’d be more accepting of my sins than God would – that you remember me, wherever you are now, if you are a living or un-living consciousness at all.

Which is something a little scary to think about. I try not to, about that or the inevitability of death, even though the part that scares me most is the question of what comes after. Is there more life – except different, stretching on for ever and ever – or is there just... nothing?

I've never really understood that, how there could just be nothing at all. The way I see it, there always has to be _something,_ right? The absence of anything at all has never made sense to me.

Maybe there _is_ a hell and a heaven, maybe there truly is life after death, but they're both reserved for the believers, and it’s just a matter of what kind of person you are that decides where you go – and if you have no belief, no faith, you’re blasted into oblivion, doomed to be forgotten.

Sometimes I think that if I could forget you things would be a lot easier, that not feeling all this pain and grief and regret would be preferable, but whenever I look back I don’t think it would. Or, I _do_ – but I don't want to live in a world that never had you in it, especially if it means never having known you at all.

Knowing you was one of the best things to ever happen to me. Knowing you gave me a little piece of myself, a piece of you for me to keep. I wouldn’t be who I am now if we hadn’t met that day in kindergarten; even if I’d met you later, I’d be different, no matter how slightly.

Knowing you... well, I couldn’t have asked for anything more, or anything better. You deserve to know that, even if you may never _really_ know that.

Always yours, Will


	3. Chapter 3

Dear Mike,

I don’t think I’m a sinner, but I’m sure as hell not a saint either. Is there an in-between? Because, really, how could the way I feel about you be so wrong when it’s just the same as the way Mom feels about Hopper, the way Lucas feels about Max, or how Jonathan feels about Nancy? It can’t be; I love you the same way they love each other.

And it’s not the getting over you part that’s hard, because I know that’s never going to happen, come hell or high water.

It’s the trying to remember how to survive without your touch, but that's tricky: I’m not sure I can even remember a time that I lived without it in the first place. You'd always been one of the few constants in my life, and then you became not a constant at all. How ironic.

You’ve always been there, no matter what. Even when I was stuck in the Upside Down it wasn’t so hard to remember the feeling of your arms wrapped around me, and how you’d smile at me with that same smile that managed to take my breath away every single time, and when I’d look at you and catch you looking at me before you quickly turned your head like you’d never been staring in the first place. It was easy to remember, all of it.

But now? Now... now _I’m_ not the missing one: you are. Now I don’t have hope that I’ll someday get to see you again, both of us alive and well. I don't have the knowledge that you’ll be there for me to fall back on when I need it most. Not even just one more time.

I’ve come to learn that death means permanence, is synonymous with it, and life is only fleeting.

Here’s the thing: it _was_ the losing you part, but it’s not so much like that anymore. When it was something present in my heart, something filling up my lungs, crowding up the space in my head, it was the knowing that – in a lot of cases – lost things stay lost. Not in mine, but sure as hell in yours. It was (and maybe still is, sometimes) that you were taken so early, at seventeen fresh, with a life to live ahead of you, with not even a goddamn high school diploma to your name. It was that you would never get to do all those things you said you wanted to: move to New York, wander through the busy streets and see the towering buildings – a city in the sky, you called it. You never got to write your so-called legendary book that you swore would launch you into stardom.

If only, I often think to myself. Losing you to stardom might have been more bearable than losing you to the stars.

(You laughed when I told you that, about losing you to stardom, and you said: _you'll never lose me, least of all to stardorm. You're my best friend._

That left me stuck: I wasn't sure whether to feel relieved, to know that I'd never lose you, or hurt, in a way I'd never tell you, to hear you call me _best friend,_ when to me you were so much more than that.

And it's ironic, too: I did end up losing you, after all. I don't blame you for not keeping good on your promise. You couldn't have known.

At least it wasn't to stardom. Maybe small mercies do exist.)

Here, how about this? I’ll make a promise to you: when I go, I’ll take you with me. I’ll draw a picture of you, as lifelike as I’m able, and carry it in my pocket wherever I go. I’ll climb to the highest floor of the Empire State Building for you – and you know how deathly afraid I am of heights – and I’ll press it to the glass and imagine that you’re there with me. Imagine that you can see the city folding and unfolding beneath us too, hear the rumble of cars so quiet it’s like they’re in a whole different world. You’ll be there too, and maybe I’ll feel complete again.

Always yours, Will


End file.
